Silicon Valley startup Orkus emerged from stealth mode this week with an IT security service designed to scale with cloud IT deployments and control data access and identities.

The Orkus Access Governance Platform was launched at the AWS re:Invent show in Las Vegas to demonstrate how it works to secure enterprise data in public cloud deployments such as Amazon Web Services.

“The cloud allows companies to easily spin up databases and create millions of new data objects — this was hard to do with legacy systems. Keeping track of who has access to which data becomes a huge problem and it needs new tools,” said Manish Kalia, co-founder and CEO of Orkus.

“Another issue is scale. As the cloud becomes more important there will be even more things to track — you cannot use a manual process — that’s why you need techniques such as machine learning to understand and govern the relationships between users and the data they are accessing.”

The Orkus platform focuses on authorization as the key to securing enterprise data in real-time. It scans the enterprise network and learns user habits and data access patterns while flagging possible security problems and preventing unauthorized data access.

Orkus can also limit data access based on government regulations such as healthcare data, or European data restricted by the European Union General Data Protection Regulation.

Orkus is able to create automatic audits of data access across a company’s cloud infrastructure over any period of time. This eliminates quarterly manual audits and also aids in forensic investigations.

The complexity of the cloud is contributing to delays and higher costs for many enterprise IT projects. A recent survey by Softchoice found a serious skills gap reported by 96% of 250 companies surveyed. Most had exceeded their cloud IT budgets and this was contributing to problems achieving business goals.

Orkus and other services aimed at easing cloud deployments by automating key tasks will be key to successful cloud IT deployments and the business agility they can provide.

The company was founded in 2017 by veterans of cloud and cybersecurity companies and has raised a seed round of $3.2 million.